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HTTP compression

Submitted on 12. September 2008 - 12:37 by admin.Last update on 12. August 2015 - 15:56.

Affects product:

Airlock WAF

Airlock is able to accelerate your web applications by compressing web responses. This reduces both bandwith and response times, particulary for large text documents (html, css, javascript etc).

How does output compression work?

Airlock always checks if the browser supports response compression. Most modern browser can handle zipped content and inform the server by adding an accept-encoding request header. Airlock uses deflate or gzip compression depending on the browsers capabilities.

Because some browsers cannot decompress all content types, Airlock restricts content compression to the following content types:

text/html

text/css

text/javascript

text/plain

text/xml

application/javascript

application/x-javascript

application/json

application/rss+xml

application/rdf+xml

application/atom+xml

application/x-axd

application/xml

application/xhtml+xml

Turn on output compression

To enable gzip compression for a mapping, tick the checkbox Compress Response Traffic on the mapping's Basic tab..

Output compression works regardless of the capabilities of your backend systems: Airlock will also compress responses that were not compressed by your application server. The application just has to correctly declare the content type of the response (see list above).

Input compression

What happens if a browser sends a compressed request to Airlock? No problem, Airlock can also handle gzip compressed request bodies. This greatly accelerates large uploads or web service requests.